Georgian Ex-Leader Faults Decline in Ties to Russia

TBILISI, Georgia, Aug. 17 -- In November 2003, Georgia's Rose Revolution toppled President Eduard Shevardnadze, and he retired to his gated residence in Tbilisi to watch his flashy successor take the country on a roller-coaster ride of reform, economic development and increasingly tense relations with Russia.

On Sunday, 10 days after that tension spilled over into a war that has devastated Georgia's infrastructure, displaced 100,000 people and shaken the national psyche, Shevardnadze would not say whether he thought Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was wrong to send military forces into Tskhinvali, capital of the separatist region of South Ossetia.

But Shevardnadze, known as the "Silver Fox," criticized the deterioration of Georgian-Russian relations under Saakashvili, especially in regard to the breakaway regions whose reintegration the current president has pushed for so vehemently.

"For reconciliation, much more time was needed, maybe five or six more years," Shevardnadze said. "Now, this will be even further postponed, but I would like to emphasize that, whatever time elapses, both Abkhazia and South Ossetia will be an integral part of Georgia."

To many Georgians, that idea now seems like a distant dream. But Shevardnadze is used to waiting.

The son of a poor teacher, he became the Soviet Union's minister of foreign affairs under Mikhail Gorbachev. Unlike Stalin, who was born in Georgia but did his fellow Georgians no favors, Shevardnadze said he opposed Soviet moves that were not in Georgia's interest. For example, he was against the building of a tunnel between North and South Ossetia through which Russia's army moved in last week.

"They were wanting this for what is happening right now," he said of the Soviet leadership.

Shevardnadze was chosen by Gorbachev in 1985 and was a soul mate of the Soviet leader from the early days of glasnost and perestroika. He played a role in negotiating major arms-control agreements with the West and in allowing the revolutions in Eastern Europe to unfold without the use of force by Moscow.

Shevardnadze resigned as foreign minister in December 1990, warning of a coming dictatorship when he felt Gorbachev was abandoning reform. After the Soviet collapse, he became acting leader of Georgia's state council in 1992. Before he took office and after, Georgia was embroiled in a period of ethnic conflict. He was formally elected president in 1995.

Under his watch, Georgia formed strong ties with the United States, which provided military training after Sept. 11, 2001, to Georgian forces to combat Chechen fighters on the Georgian side of the Russian border. During his presidency, Georgia began constructing a pipeline to bring Caspian Sea oil from Azerbaijan through Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean, bypassing Russia and Iran. That pipeline, Georgian officials say, has become a target of Russian bombing.

His administration was riddled with corruption, however, and since being replaced, he has had little to do with politics.

Sitting in a spacious office filled with portraits and photographs from his years as Georgia's president, Shevardnadze, now 80, condemned recent actions by the Russians, noting that they had for centuries seen Georgia as a colony. He flipped through a book of his memoirs, opening to a picture of him meeting with Ossetian leaders in the mid-1990s, in calmer times.